He’s taken that life experience and channeled it into a remarkable television series, Rectify, which airs on Thursday on the Sundance Channel. It’s the story of Daniel Holden, who’s been released from prison after spending all of his adult life on death row. And about how Daniel's return affects his family, and the small Georgia town where Holden’s girlfriend was murdered. With its deliberate pacing, precise dialogue, and fresh camerawork, Rectify takes the best moments of a Terrence Malick film and brings them to the small screen. It’s simply the best show on television right now and can hold its own against anything currently on hiatus. It’s that good.

McKinnon, the show’s writer and showrunner, was finishing up production on this season’s last episodes, and took a few minutes to talk about his career, his job, his show and how to watch it. (The first part of the interview is spoiler free if you haven't watched the show, and the section that begins to talk about plot specifics is marked with a spoiler alert.)

How did you make the leap from being an actor to being a showrunner?

There’s something to be said for having no life plan. It’s finally paying off. When I was a teenager, thinking about what I might want to do with my life, it was the great era of journalism. Watergate. and Bernstein. One of my mother and father’s dearest friends became the editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and went on to The Washington Post. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covered civil rights. That was the sexy thing of that era, being a journalist. Of course we know what’s happened since…<laughs>

I thought I would like to be a writer. I wrote as a teenager into my early adulthood. Thank God nobody ever saw it. I was easily dissuaded as a writer. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t seasoned. I came into acting and I tried to figure out how to be competent at that. I still wrote stories, but under the cloak of darkness. Over the years, I’ve made some low-budget films using that experience of being around a movie set.

Fast forward, centuries later, I became inspired by that new golden of television with The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. It was a great way to tell a story. Serialized, like a chapter of a book. Not thinking about this as a way to make a living, but just an inspiring way to experience story. Rectify came into my consciousness and it couldn’t be told in a movie. It was a series. It required the right timing of this era of television for it to happen. And it happened.

When we talk about that Golden Era, at the very top was Deadwood.

Sitting at the knee of [showrunner] David Milch, it was incredible. You, along with every actor on the show, realized how special it is to serve that story in all its existentialness, if that’s a word. I watched how he worked, how hands-on he was with the actors, to keep that vision more unified. It’s all soldiered through him. It was a great education, and I got paid for it.

If a viewer is coming fresh to the series, what would you want them to know about season one.

I think it’s not the kind of show where you’re texting and checking your e-mail. It requires being willing to be quiet for a time. To be still and let it wash over you. It’s not going to hit you with fast and furious and overt storytelling. I think you have to be in the right frame of mind and body for that.

Some people crave that, and some people can’t abide by that. But I think there are some people who could abide by it if they were ready to be quiet for a little bit. With patience a lot of people get drawn in and get accustomed to the rhythms of the show.

I was trying to multi-task a little when I was re-watching some of the episodes and it just didn’t work.

It’s an ADD’s nightmare. <laughs>

A year ago I would have had a hard time explaining Rectify, but now I guess I’d ask “Have you watched True Detective?”

That’s a good way of preparing them for the experience.

It would have been really easy to make Daniel a plot device rather than a character and have the show center on whether or not he's going to be re-tried for the murder.